The young man in the photograph may already have gotten to meet his birth parents. I wonder if it was what he hoped.

A new exhibit at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum invited area high school students to submit portraits — photographs, paintings, drawings — accompanied by little stories about the person pictured. Along with her portrait of a young guy with pronounced cheekbones and thick eyelashes, “Man & Clock,” Wausau East High School sophomore Julia Reisling quoted her unnamed subject, someone she had never met before.

“The happiest moment of my life was when I got in contact with my birth parents,” he said. “My mom contacted me on my birthday last month for the first time. They live in Texas, and I’ll be visiting them in March. My mom gave me up because she was too young; she was 15 when she had me, making her 35 now, and me 20. My adopted parents have always wanted me to have a relationship with my parents.”

The Woodson’s exhibit is called “Humans of Wausau,” an allusion to the mega-popular blog Humans of New York. That blog is a collection of street portraits of New Yorkers accompanied by short interviews, the subject's own words about herself. It has featured famous people and homeless guys, beautiful people and regular, working folks. It seems like a good blog and the stories can be funny or touching. On the other hand it’s all about New York and New Yorkers, which to this Midwesterner's eye would seem to be an over-celebrated subject if ever there was one.

But Humans of Wausau, that is something new. And many of the portraits are very good, and there’s also something very interesting about seeing the central Wisconsin people that local high school students chose to document, and the warmth and skill with which they did it. An Internet cliche is “your faith in humanity will be restored,” but then again humanity is literally what the exhibit is about, so maybe it fits.

Here’s a photograph by Ben Diny of mayoral candidate Jay Kronenwetter coming out of the IGA. Here’s a self-portrait of Alicia Lloyd, the artist, with her white earbuds in. Here’s the smiling face of the Rev. Tony J. Patterson Sr., chairman of the Wausau and Marathon County Diversity Commission, rendered beautifully in charcoal by Wausau East High School senior Ellicia Myles. Here’s a photograph of a line of Hmong girls in traditional dress and a reflection on her own relationship to her cultural history from Kaomi Yang of Wausau West High School.

Another good piece: A triptych of photographs called "Movement" by Wausau East High School junior Lauren Mulder. It shows Nathalie Murillo, a native of Nicaragua who grew up here. "Although she has grown to love Wisconsin," Mulder writes, "(Murillo) also longs intensely for something more; a certain something is missing from her life. ... She wishes to travel the world." That is, of course, is a great description of the way it feels to be young and becoming an adult, and maybe a description of the way it still feels when you grow up.

The exhibit was coordinated by the Woodson with Wausau Area High School Leadership Program students from Wausau East, Wausau West, D.C. Everest and Newman Catholic high schools. And part of the beauty of it is that it’s a concept that could work anywhere. Humans of anywhere. We all have interesting faces, and every human has a story.